


Tumblr Collection

by TheFlashFic



Category: The Flash (TV 2014)
Genre: Gen, M/M, Multi, there's also a cisco/hartley in here that's very much unfriendly to hartley so i'm not tagging it
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2016-12-11
Updated: 2016-12-10
Packaged: 2018-09-07 18:29:32
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 8
Words: 19,614
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/8811550
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/TheFlashFic/pseuds/TheFlashFic
Summary: Most of the short one-shots that have wasted away forgotten on my tumblr. Mostly prompted, all random, see chapter titles for basic descriptions.





	1. Iris and Cisco, gen, season one - honesty

**Author's Note:**

> Honesty - Iris and Cisco, gen, season one.
> 
> This one was inspired by my own headcanon about Cisco not being shown as an active participant in the conspiracy to lie to Iris during season one. I want him to be better than that, so I wrote him that way.

“Barry is the Flash." 

Iris blinks. 

They’re having a nice, aimless small-talk conversation, the way you do with people you kind-of-know and sort-of-like when you both show up in the line at Jitters at the same time. Iris is halfway through a summation of how her new job is going (leaving out specifics about the investigation she’s working on, of course) when those words spill out of Cisco’s politely smiling mouth.

His face is now all eyes. "Oh, man. I am going to die. I can’t believe I did that. They are going to kill me." 

"Barry. Allen." 

"Is the Flash. Oh god, I can’t stop _doing_ it!" 

She grabs his arm and pulls him out of the line before any of the brain-dead caffeine junkies around them can take interest in the conversation. 

Her mind whirls as she hauls him over to a relatively quiet corner. Strange humans with weird powers, STAR Labs being involved, Barry’s secretive world since he awoke from his coma. 

It makes so much sense that she can’t register much surprise. It feels inevitable, like she was one photo or stammered-out-excuse away from finding out anyway. 

She’s already moving ten steps ahead. STAR Labs knows. Her dad knows. Eddie…no, he doesn’t know. He’s too impressed by the Flash to equate him with Barry. But that explains why Cisco and Caitlin have stayed so present in Barry’s life, and where all his time goes now. And why Barry is constantly pushing Iris away. 

She’s almost glad, for a moment, almost grateful. That means the new stress in their relationship isn’t entirely due to her not instantly proclaiming her love for him. 

That explains why Barry didn’t ‘believe’ in the Flash at the beginning. Why he told her to stop looking into it. Why he walked away from her - for a few days, anyway - when she refused. Why the guy who was always dreaming of the impossible seemed to stop believing in the one aspect of it Iris got involved with. Why The Flash chose _her_ to open up to.

She wants to go sit in a quiet room somewhere and replay every moment in her life since Barry woke up. But she can do that later. 

Her focus falls on Cisco, and she opens her mouth and shuts it a couple of times, unable to form words. 

He looks terrified, but not of her. "They were so firm about not telling you. Barry is so stubborn about it, and Joe’s going to straight-up wrap his hands around my throat when he finds out I told you. But it’s crap, okay? They talk like you not knowing will make you safe, but not-knowing _never_ makes people safer. It’s always the opposite, every single time, but I tell Barry that and he tells me it’s none of my business, and he’s right, but here I am, and I just told you, and you…you don’t look too surprised, actually." 

"I am,” Iris says, her voice soft, when Cisco pauses to breathe. “And I’m not. I knew you had something to do with these people running around, these bad people with strange powers. I knew it was STAR." 

Cisco nods, unhesitating. "The accident, yeah. It changed everybody all at once, I mean, it’s not like we’re _breeding_ them or anything. And we’re stopping the ones we find. Barry’s stopping them, mostly, but." 

He’s a reporter’s dream, a man who can’t stop blurting the truth once he’s started. But Iris isn’t thinking about work.

She tests his sudden honesty. "Caitlin’s cousin?" 

"Robbie. Her fiance. He died, now he’s a meta. He does cool fire things. And flies. Luckily he’s not an evil one." 

"Meta?”

“Metahuman. Our term for the people who got affected.” Cisco smiles suddenly, bright and cloudless. “And now you know. They’re gonna kill me, but whatever, they can’t make you not-know now that you do. Oh, man, I feel like I just lost _weight_." 

She smiles after a moment. It feels thin and brittle on her face, though she means it sincerely. "Who else knows?" 

"Just us. The lab, I mean. And Joe, he saw Barry doing his thing early on. And a bunch of the metas we’ve stopped. Oh, and Felicity, and–”

“Felicity? Starling City Felicity?" 

"Yep. A few people in Starling, actually, but I can’t go into detail about that because that’s _really_ not my secret to tell." 

Starling City has the Vigilante. So Felicity works with the Vigilante, then? And…and with Oliver Queen, who was in town at the same time a masked bowman saved her and Eddie from…from the Flash himself. 

Jesus, it’s almost too much. 

Iris narrows her eyes at Cisco. "So what else have they been lying about for months?" 

He thinks about that seriously. "I think that’s it, really. I mean there’s probably a ton of little lies they have to tell to make the big lie work, because lying is a stupid ugly spreading cancer that way, but. You know.” He frowns suddenly, looking at her carefully. “You said you already knew it was STAR. The metas." 

She hesitates, but what the hell. Honesty all around. "My mentor at work has been quietly investigating the lab. I’m helping him now." 

"Whoa.” Cisco’s all eyes again, but only for a moment. The frown tugs at his mouth, like it’s an unnatural expression he has to struggle to maintain. “Well. I mean people have investigated us since even before the accident. So no shock, I guess. But it’s trickier now that…" 

"He’s looking into Wells." 

"Yeah, that’s…a theme these days.” Cisco sighs, miserable, until a moment later when he shrugs and lets it go. “People know about The Flash. Unless they’re just not paying attention they know there are other metas out there doing bad things. So…good. I guess. That might be a good thing. If people find out then we won’t have to deal with it alone anymore. What’s his focus on Wells?" 

"Mason thinks he intended the accident to happen exactly as it did.” Iris watches Cisco carefully, though his feelings are usually so obvious they hardly have to be studied. 

But this time she’s surprised how obvious he is. His face blanches to a grey, and he takes a small step back, and his hands are fists at his sides. “Is there proof?" 

"Not yet." 

"Joe said…” Cisco shakes his head. His gaze has gone unfocused. “I keep thinking about it. I can’t stop watching him, and thinking…he knew about Barry." 

"What do you mean?" 

"I mean…there were hundreds of people hurt in different ways after the explosion. Wells only ever focused on Barry." 

"Like he knew about the Flash…" 

”…before Barry ever woke up.“ Cisco swallows. 

Iris wants to get to work. She wants to be at the paper talking theory with Mason and digging into Wells’ entire history line by line. Barry has been lying to her for months, lying directly to her, looking in her eyes and _lying_ , which is something she wouldn’t have thought he could even do before this conversation. Her dad has been lying to her, just as blatantly, almost as often. 

She’s going to deal with that. She is going to stir up absolute hellfire for that. 

But that isn’t going to stop her from _burying_ Harrison Wells if it turns out that he deliberately hurt Barry to twist him into what he is now. Barry Allen is a liar, and a metahuman, and she isn’t sure she knows him at all anymore, but he’s still hers. And Iris West does not tolerate people hurting the ones who are hers. 

She focuses on Cisco and frowns in understanding at the turmoil in his eyes. "It’s not fun being lied to,” she states. 

He shakes his head, but when he meets her eyes he seems to see something he can draw strength from. He straightens, his chin comes up, and he smiles. “No more." 

She nods, sharp. "No more.” Because the truth is out. If Cisco doesn’t tell Barry and Joe that he told Iris then they’ll find out as she tears the both of them inside out for daring to keep life-altering secrets from her. As if she hasn’t been the strongest person in this family for _years_. 

And whatever Harrison Wells is hiding, it’s coming out. One way or another, everything is coming out. 

She returns Cisco’s small smile, because at least there’s one person in this that she can talk to now. 

“Nothing’s going to be easy anymore, is it?” He asks it with a wry smile, not needing an answer. “Everything is going to get worse." 

She shrugs. Maybe worse, maybe better. Probably worse. 

But she’ll take an honest worse over a clueless better anytime. She’s only mad (furious, it’s already growing red in the corners of her vision, she is _furious_ ) that that choice was made _for_ her until now, and made wrong.

"I have to go.” She reaches out and squeezes his arm. “Thank you. I won’t pretend I don’t know the truth now that you’ve told me, but I can tell them that I figured it out on my own?" 

"Thanks,” he returns. “But it’s cool. I do enough dumb stuff that I know how to own up to it by now." He smiles weakly. "If you need help on that story, a source or whatever…”

“Call you?”

“Keep your dad from murdering me. _Then_ call me." 

She laughs. It feels surprisingly good. He was right a few minutes ago: she knows now, and no matter how angry her dad and Barry get they can’t take that away. 

She just has to decide what to do about it. 

As she leaves Jitters (without her coffee, but hey, she had a pretty effective non-caffeinated wake-up call all the same) she ponders how addictive something like honesty can be. How now that she knows more than she did she wants to know everything. She will know everything. 

And how the two best men in her life have made themselves habitual liars because they were afraid of being honest with her. 

It’s interesting, in a philosophical kind of way. If she was an essayist she might give it some thought, try to put it into words. 

But she’s not an essayist or a philosopher. Iris West is a reporter. And it’s time to get to work. 


	2. Cisco/Ronnie, unrequited crush, season one

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Anonymous asked: "If you're still open to prompts: Everyone assumed Cisco had a crush on Caitlin. He actually had a crush on Ronnie. Cue pining."

“I have to say, I didn’t miss that.”

Caitlin looks up from the display she’s been obsessively studying every single aspect of. “Hmm?”

Ronnie sits on the table, sensors pressed into his skin, shirtless in the cool lab air but not complaining. He’s smiling, the same small, unfading smile he’s been looking at Caitlin with since he became _him_ again, instead of _them_.

Ronnie looks back at her, then nods out the clear glass walls into the cortex. “I forgot he does this.”

Caitlin follows his gaze and sees Cisco sitting at his computers. His eyes are on them, or on the wall dividing them, and he’s as still as he ever is as he openly gazes.

Caitlin has a flash of memory suddenly, of a dozen discussions she and Ronnie used to have about Cisco and the way he looked at Caitlin and whether it was cute or potentially harmful towards all of their growing friendships. She hasn’t thought about that in ages. To hear Ronnie talk Cisco spent all his time gazing adoringly at Caitlin, but every time Caitlin worked with Cisco on something back before the accident, she never noticed.

And it isn’t like she's blind to the looks of men. She’s a conventionally attractive woman who got her PhD in bio-engineering, she has always been aware of the reactions of men around her. Usually she’s either ignored, resented, sexualized, or considered a mascot. Doctor Barbie.

But Cisco isn’t like that with her. Not before the accident, despite Ronnie’s insistence. And definitely not since the accident.

“Was it bad?” As if reading her thoughts and completely misinterpreting them, Ronnie looks away from Cisco’s oblivious staring and turns back to her. “You two have had to work closely for a while, does he ever get—”

“No.” Her answer is fast, sharper than she intends. “And don’t start speculating about it, okay? He is literally the only person I had after the accident. He’s my best friend, and he has never been inappropriate with me. This…this is just…” She gestures out the glass partition, and regrets it when in the other room Cisco realizes he’s staring and they’re watching him, and he drops his head instantly and pretends to work. He only uses his hair as a curtain when he’s _really_ embarrassed. She knows that.

She knows a lot of things about him. He is the closest person in the world to her.

So she doesn’t finish what she was saying to Ronnie, because no matter how wrong Ronnie is…Cisco really was staring. And he’s embarrassed to be caught. Cisco isn’t the kind to embarrass easily.

But she’s not lying to Ronnie, either. Cisco hasn’t been inappropriate. They have spent days on end alone together, working right on top of each other, no one else to talk to. They’ve gone to dinner together, gotten drunk together, passed out on one or another of their couches while watching bad movies and eating take-out. She’s come to work in Cisco’s clothes once or twice, but there’s no one around to notice so it was never a big deal.

She and Cisco have made life-altering decisions together. They chose, together, to stay at STAR when everyone else was fleeing to salvage their careers. They chose, together, to involve themselves in this metahuman insanity, at first against Doctor Wells’ wishes.

He is the first one she looks to, no matter what, when there’s something big happening around them. She isn’t entirely sure, honestly, that he won’t still be. It will take her a little while to get used to Ronnie being the one who should be in that position.

And this, the staring and the shyness and the embarrassment, this is new. And it’s old. (She argued with Ronnie months ago whenever he brought it up, but she wasn’t blind. She caught Cisco a few times. Only when Ronnie was around to make her aware of it, though.)

It won’t be a problem. She knows that. Whatever it is making his old fascination return now that Ronnie’s back, she’ll just have to…

Oh.

_Ohhhh._

She understands, just like that, from one thought to the next.

 _“He’s great! He’s just…kind of awkward.”_ That was how Ronnie used to describe Cisco. _“Funny guy, just needs to get over how self-conscious he is.”_

But Cisco isn’t, wasn’t ever, self-conscious. Cisco took on Hartley Rathaway his first day of work, and every day afterward, without ever once apologizing or being embarrassed by the flaws Hartley harped at him about.

She _has_ seen Cisco embarrassed and self-conscious in rare moments. With Bette San Souci, with one of the investigators the FDA sent around to the lab for weeks after the explosion who used to send Cisco out of rooms blushing at the slightest glance.

With, apparently, Ronnie.

Not Caitlin. Ronnie.

She looks back out at Cisco, catches his eyes on them, their little glassed-in room, again. She makes a sound, soft, realization and sympathy and understanding all in one.

He wasn’t looking for Ronnie for hersake, he said once. She thought he meant he was doing it because of his own guilt. She thought all his choked-up words at the service she had for Ronnie were just to help her get through. She thought he drank so much for a while there because she was drinking too, and he was too nice a guy to make her drink alone.

She thought his sorrow was empathy. She thought his recent obsession was guilt.

She sighs, tearing her eyes from Cisco and his unusual stillness, his vacant, sad gaze as he looks right through her to the man on the table behind her.

He’ll be mortified when she brings it up; she’s already dreading the conversation. But they’ll have it anyway, because she loves Cisco. Adores him, in a real, deep way, and he would never make her suffer alone, so she isn’t going to abandon him to this.

She looks back at Ronnie with a small smile and speaks honestly. “Don’t worry about Cisco. I’ll take care of it.”

And she will, because her and Cisco…that’s what they do. That’s what they’ve done for this last horrible, amazing year. They take care of each other.


	3. Cisco/Hartley, exploration of prejudice

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Anonymous asked: "Cisco and Hartley were together for awhile and it was okay. But Hartley grew up with so many bullshit preconceptions about people who aren't rich, straight, smart, and white from his parents and he never managed to work past it, so his relationship with Cisco imploded in a spectacularly ugly fashion"
> 
> *Written back when I thought Cisco's background would be closer to his original comic background than it turned out to be.*
> 
> Not Hartley friendly.

The worst part is they’re in bed when it all comes out.

Not actively fucking or anything, just laying there doing some separate reading which usually would turn into comparing notes which would turn into debating which would eventually turn into fucking. But still, the bed is Cisco’s safe zone. The bed is where they can talk in quiet, non-hostile voices and he can say corny things that Hartley, yes, laughs at, but without that mocking edge.

They’re alone in bed, after all. Hartley doesn’t get nearly as defensive without an audience around.

But this is a kind of big deal for him, so Cisco considers not even bringing it up in the relative safety of their bed. Big deals are always tricky with Hartley. Approaching them like they’re not big deals never works, because Hartley reads people (Cisco) too well.

Even avoiding the issue doesn’t work, usually. It sure doesn’t work this time, because Hartley’s the one that breaks the silence.

“You realize I can tell you’re not really reading.”

Cisco looks over, feeling a familiar swell and then fade of irritation at that laugh in Hartley’s voice, that ‘don’t ever try to keep anything from me, dear, I’m much smarter than you’ laugh. Still, because he’s an idiot, and because Hartley likes to show off, he retorts anyway. “You’re not even looking at me, how can you possibly tell that—”

“Because, cariñito…” Hartley sits up, setting Scientific America to the side with less contempt than usual. He twists to regard Cisco, and there’s actually some small amount of affection visible in his eyes. “You’re actually interesting when you read, you know that? You’re very…expressive. Colorful. I can see in your eyebrows how accurate the articles are, and how anxious you are to duplicate whatever you’re reading about.”

He reaches out. He slides his index finger down over Cisco’s forehead, as if smoothing down invisible furrows. “Everything you think shows right here. And in the way you shift around when you’re bored, and you sigh when you’re already five steps ahead of whatever you’re reading.”

Cisco is surprised. Even in bed Hartley doesn’t offer compliments unasked, and this reads suspiciously like compliments. He feels himself relaxing a little, smiling sheepishly at Hartley’s recitation of his mannerisms. He didn’t realize he did any of those things.

He didn’t know Hartley paid him any attention during these joint reading sessions.

Hartley is farsighted. He doesn’t wear his glasses to bed, and Cisco loves to look at him this way. Vulnerable, though that’s probably corny and he’ll never say it out loud. He just grins crookedly at Hartley’s unprotected gaze and sits up, closing the lid of his laptop and setting it on the table.

Hartley grins back, faint and slightly sharp like all his smiles are. “I can actually hear it, you know. The rusty grinding sound as your brain kicks into gear. The faint smell of smoke as you try to process—”

“Fuck off!” Cisco laughs, reaching out and shoving him.

“Well.” Hartley laughs and bats away his arm, but thinks twice and leans to catch his hand before it can escape. He slides their fingers together. “I know you were expecting the other shoe to drop. I'm just delivering.”

“You underestimate how fine I’d be with that other shoe floating around forever.” Cisco slides in closer. Hartley’s arm comes up and Cisco slips in against him, nestling back against his chest where they already know he fits pretty damned well.  

From there, with Hartley stroking an absent hand against his arm and breathing quietly in his ear, it feels even safer than usual. And Cisco, without any more hesitation, goes ahead and asks what he’s been considering for a couple of weeks.

“You want to come with me?”

There’s a too-short pause, and Hartley gets a little tense against his back, but that fades.

Cisco’s only been planning one trip, so he has no doubt Hartley knows instantly what he means. He can practically hear Hartley flipping the question around and studying the thousand implications behind it.

“To the birthday,” Hartley says finally, his voice flat. Conclusions all reached.

Cisco already feels less safe. He twists his head up and back, trying to see something of Hartley’s expression. “Well, yeah. It’s just a couple of days, you can get out of here for a while. Shake the lab off.”

“You want _me…_ to go to the birthday party. In _Detroit._ ” Hartley drawls the words out like Cisco just insisted to him that they build a giant pony track at STAR in place of the synchrotron.

Cisco sits up. Hartley tugs at him for a moment but sighs and lets him go when Cisco insists. Cisco twists, folding his legs under him, and regards Hartley.

He can’t read the exact objection on Hartley’s face, just that the objection exists and Hartley thinks it should be painfully obvious what it is.

Hartley isn’t the only one who can shorthand conversations, though. Cisco flaps his hand. “Might as well tell me.”

“It’s _Detroit_. Do they even let people like me walk the streets of Detroit?” He seems amused.

Cisco frowns. “People like…like what? Like…gay? Because you realize I’ll be there too, right?”

Hartley snorts, his you’re-so-cute patronizing snort. “I mean white.”

“Oh my god, dude. Seriously?”

“Don’t dude me.” The comeback is quick and expected. “You are literally from the cesspool of the country, the most violent city on the continent, probably, at least in the US. Statistics don’t lie.”

Cisco groans and rubs at his forehead. “You are such a snob. How do I always forget what a snob you—”

“Cisco. Let’s break down what you’re asking.” Nothing safe here anymore. This is Hartley’s team-lead voice. They might as well have an audience of awkwardly-shifting engineering techs the way they do for these arguments at work.

“You want me to go to Detroit. You want me, white and gay and obviously moneyed, to go to the poorest, filthiest city in—”

“I can’t take you seriously if you call yourself _moneyed_ , Hartley.” Cisco scoots back to his side of the bed. “Forget it. Keep your pale ass out of my gutter of a hometown.”

But Hartley’s just getting started. “You want me to go to Detroit, of all places, for…what? For _mami_ ’s fiftieth birthday party.”

Cisco has slid to the edge of the bed and is about to get up to march to the bathroom – distance is good between them, at least once or twice a day – but the way Hartley accents mami makes him still. He sits, back to his boyfriend, and waits.

Hartley goes on, because he’s too stupid not to. “You want to introduce mami and papi Ramon to your white, gay lover. You want me to stand around your infested tenement in _Detroit_ pretending not to understand when they insult me in hood Spanish, or consoling you when your mom starts clutching rosaries and weeping into her frijoles. Really. That’s how you want this to go.”

Cisco speaks through his teeth. “If you have any taco references or border-crossing jokes, you want to go ahead and throw them into the mix?”

“All I need is a million Ramon cousins coming after me in her defense.” Hartley either doesn’t hear the real anger in Cisco’s tone or doesn’t care. “Christ, and your brother’s old gang. Nothing better than embittered ex-felons probably working as day-laborers since their attempt to rule the barrio didn’t work out. I’m sure they’ll love knowing that their old leader’s little brother is taking it up the ass from someone like me.”

“You really need to shut up.”

“Okay, yes, of course, because here comes the part where you get self-righteous and try to deny any of those words, though everything I know of your background came right from your mouth.”

“No.” Cisco shoots to his feet, turns, and he’s only wearing his X-Men boxers but he doesn’t give a shit. His hands are fists at his sides, and at times like this he has no idea what kind of glutton for punishment he must be. Because Hartley looks irritated, above repercussion, and still so fucking beautiful with his hair mussed and his eyes squinting without his glasses.

Fucking prick. “No,” he says again. “All you ‘know’ about my background you extrapolated from about ten words. Because that’s what you do. You hear, and then you guess, and you take your guesses as God’s own truth because they’re yours and you can’t possibly be wrong.”

Hartley hesitates, like he’s just realizing he made a misstep. But he’s never one to back down, so he reaches to the table beside him, grabs his glasses and slides them on. He gazes up at Cisco with that thin-lipped irritation that makes Cisco utterly fucking insane.

“Do tell me what I got wrong.”

But there’s too much, and the truth is too complicated.

Cisco doesn’t talk about his past, which is how he knows for a fact that he never told Hartley details. Yes, Hartley knows his brother was in a gang when he died. That much Cisco mentioned. Mentioned, because he doesn’t give details, because his home and his family and their place in his world are fucking _sacred_ to him. Hartley hadn’t earned it yet.

This invitation was Cisco testing those waters, feeling like Hartley, under his prickly, judgmental surface, might actually warrant that trust.

His mother is Catholic, yeah. She has a rosary that she takes to church on Sundays. She doesn’t clutch it weeping when her children sin. She doesn’t consider Cisco being gay to be a sin, and she’s known about it since he was leaving for college at sixteen and they talked for literal hours at a time the week before he went.

They don’t live in a tenement. They rent a house, her and his dad and his two youngest sisters. It’s not the nicest house, it’s not a Rathaway estate, but it’s home and it has been since he was 13 and they moved away from the street that was still stained in Armando’s blood.

They don’t have a huge extended family, and what they do have mostly lives in San Francisco. And he doesn’t know the old Los Lobos crew too well, maybe some of them do wait every morning in a Home Depot parking lot to get picked up for a day’s work. If they do, they’ll still be smart, hard-working, exceptional people who survived the streets that took his brother.

Hartley is right about precisely one thing only: statistically, Detroit can be a dangerous city.

Everything else is so reduced and narrowed and spat-out that Cisco can’t find the words to explain anything like the truth to Hartley. Not when Hartley’s taking even this pause to be a concession that he’s right and Cisco just doesn’t want to admit it.  

So Cisco shakes his head, and clenches his fists. “If that’s who I am in your mind, why the hell are you in my bed?”

Hartley tilts his head, taken by surprise by the question. He considers it, and just that consideration is so fucking damning but he’s too big a prick to realize it.

And his answer is the worst answer he could ever, ever give. “Well, obviously you’re not like them. You’re better than where you came from.”

Cisco doesn’t talk about his family, his past, because those things are sacred. His parents, his sisters, his brother Dante, the ghost of Armando. Their cousins, their huge colorful neighborhood growing up. Detroit. Mexicantown, the shitty asbestos-clogged high school he nearly flunked out of before someone finally thought that maybe he was miserable because he was too smart, not too stupid.

Of course Cisco is like them. He is from them, he is them. He is so fucking proud of the Ramon family. He’s proud of Detroit. He’s proud to be from immigrant parents, to have grown up bilingual, to eat a plate of mazorca desgranada for an after-school snack even as his mom stands at the stove trying out some fried chicken recipe she badgered out of a stranger at the grocery store.

He’s as proud of that side of him as he’s proud of his collection of six-dozen themed t-shirts, his WoW character breaking level 90 the day after the expansion came out, and his design for the nionium cavity for the acceleration of ultrarelativistic particles making it into the final design at STAR despite Hartley’s competing design and vehement arguments with Wells.

And he was fine dating someone who badmouthed him, and rolled his eyes at everything he said, and made fun of his clothes and his DVD collection and his occasional DnD games with some of the lab techs. But he will be absolutely fucked if he dates someone who despises where he comes from and denies who he is.

He swallows through the giant, angry lump in his throat. “Well. I do have some good news for you.” Before Hartley can ask, Cisco reaches down, grabs his starched white button-down work shirt from the floor, and lobs it at him. “You’re done slumming.”

It gets ugly fast.

Hartley doesn’t like being turned out, and his conclusion (‘maybe you’re not as different from the trash in Detroit as I imagined’) makes Cisco hurl things and call him gringo pendejo and maybe Hartley thinks that proves him right but Cisco’s way beyond giving a fuck.

It helps that no one at work ever knew about the two of them. It hurts, too, because every time Hartley speaks to him in Spanish after that Cisco hears the mockery in it and he gets way too oversensitive. Every time Hartley offers wry, drawling relationship advice to someone who didn’t want his opinion – and it’s usually something like ‘don’t be afraid to date beneath you, that can be fairly diverting for a little while, but for god’s sake don’t take it seriously’ – his eyes always seem to find Cisco, and his smile always seems curved in a private way.

It’s lonely, and it’s wrenching, and Cisco can’t get into bed at night without a thousand memories of their brief relationship and the way Hartley slept with him _despite_ who he is, not because of it.

But when Hartley leaves, actually walks out of STAR only days before the accelerator that’s been their lives for almost two years is set to be turned on, Cisco doesn’t even ask why.

He just goes home, curls up in his living room, and calls his mom for a long, cheerful talk about everything he’s missing back home.


	4. Cisco & Joe - bonding over music, gen

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> AKA: the ficlet that inspired Like a Summer, mostly by making me think of Cisco/Joe in terms of music. 
> 
> Anonymous asked: "Cisco and Joe bonding. Anything at all with those two being friends. Maybe talking about Barry?"

“ _‘When you’re takin every kind of pill…''_ ” Cisco dances his way over to the suit once the volume on the music is high enough to rattle the table (i.e. almost high enough to satisfy him, but Wells has rules about this kind of thing). _“‘Nothin seems to ever cure your ills…’”_

Sundays are his favorite days to come in and mess around with his extra projects. Caitlin tends to be the come-early-stay-late type on weekdays (Cisco does that too), and Wells…who knows what Wells does, it’s generally safest to assume that he’s always rolling around somewhere.

But Sundays, unless Barry’s saving the world or there’s another unforeseen meta floating around making bad things happen, are Cisco’s day. He can clock in as much time as he wants, fiddle with his projects, play his music, eat every grain of sugar in the county, and no one comes around to wag their finger at him.

“‘ _Fuuuuuuuunkenteleeeeeechy,_ ’” he sings as he grabs a pair of pliers. The pliers, of course, instantly become a mic, the silent suit becomes an audience, and his hips get moving without his realizing it. “‘ _Fuuuuuuuunken_ tel _echy!_ ’” He bops his way over to the table, resisting the urge to use the pliers as a drumstick and beat out the rhythm of the song. “Bow bow bow booooow-wow,” he mimics the guitar, his voice already softening as he hunches over the suit. He’ll forget the music’s even playing in about two more minutes. But he still likes to have it on.

“You listen to this?”

The voice makes him yelp. He spins around, his plier-mic now a plier-sword in case the intruder is an unfriendly one.

But. Nope. Friendliest damn intruder ever. Cisco grins and relaxes. “Hey!”

Joe West grins back at him just as big. “Hey yourself. I tried your phone. Barry said if you don’t answer that means you’re working, so. Here I am.”

Cisco moves over to the table his speaker is blasting from. He turns down the volume (a bit), and there’s surprise in his voice when he answers. “You came looking for _me_?”

“I did.” Joe nods at the iPod. “Even before I realized what great taste you have.”

Cisco beams, this appreciation for 70s funk being all too rare. “Oh, hey, yeah, I guess this was around your time.”

Joe scowls, laughter in his eyes. “I wasn’t even ten when this came out, wise ass.”

Cisco’s hands raise in cheerful surrender. “All those decades, who can do the math?”

“Laugh it up, but of all the people in this room which one saw Funkcronomicon performed live?”

Cisco’s grin fades in instant, utter awe. “Axiom Funk. Bootsy.”

Joe nods, pleased. “Bootsy. Parliament. Herbie Hancock.”

“Bernie _Worrell_ , oh _man_. No Eddie Hazel, though.”

“Nope, he was gone by then. You know your stuff, kid.”

Cisco just shakes his head, amazed. “And I’ve touched you before. I have totally six-degrees’d P-Funk.”

“Well, I never got to touch any of ‘em, but…yeah.” Joe wanders over, studying Cisco and the suit in turn. “So what’s the project?”

“Just some touch-ups.” Cisco looks back at the table, all but puffing up in instant pride. “There’s a kink in the sensors, the faster he goes the more delayed the readings are to get back to our systems. And I mean by ‘delays’ I’m talking about like _percentages_ of a second, but still. Once Barry starts hitting those Reverse-Flash speeds it’s gonna become bigger percentages of a second, and that’s unacceptable.”

Joe nods, thoughtful and a little blank the way he tends to be when the lab geeks get techy around him. “You think he’s gonna get as fast as that guy? He’s not too hopeful.”  

“I mean…yeah, of course.” Uncontrollably, Cisco rolls his eyes, because god forbid Barry Allen have confidence in himself. Cisco has wondered before if there’s a set number of people whose lives a guy has to save before that guy is able to think of himself as the obviously awesome hero that he is.

“That dude has been around at least the last fifteen years, right? And Barry thinks that if he can’t top him in three days’ time then it’s never gonna happen, which is nuts.” He shrugs, approaching the suit and fingering the sleeve with the smile on his face that Caitlin calls ‘doting’. “But hey, that’s part of my job.”

“What, to make sure it happens?” Joe approaches the table on the other side, studying the suit in interest, like there’s some switch Cisco can pull that will double Barry’s speed.

“Nah, to believe in Barry until Barry can believe in himself.”

Joe doesn’t answer.

Cisco glances over, and his face heats when he sees Joe staring at him. “I mean. That’s what we do, right?”

Joe smiles, giant and broad and man, Cisco’s got nothing on him when it comes to doting. “That’s what we do,” he confirms.

Cisco grins.

“You better watch out talking like that,” Joe goes on, and even his voice sounds just _utterly_ openly affectionate. “The Wests have a habit of taking in the kids we really like.”

Cisco laughs. “I’m twenty-two,” he protests, mostly because he knows it’ll make Joe chuckle the way older people always chuckle at the idea that anyone under thirty is grown. “And a _half_. But I appreciate the fact that ‘Cisco West’ sounds like someone Nickleodeon would make a show about the misadventures of, so. You know. Maybe.”

Joe laughs, and Cisco takes a moment to almost wish. He adores the Wests and their open affection, and he’s a long, long way from home.

“So…what can I do for you?” he asks finally, because those thoughts are silly. He’s totally grown. “I mean besides inviting myself over later to listen to funk vinyls that I know you must own.”

“I do own,” Joe confirms.

But then he glances around the lab, and his smile fades. “There’s a lot of secrets in this building.”

Cisco blinks at the sudden seriousness but nods, because that’s easy enough to see.

“Barry needs this place, I know that. We all do. But…”

“Secrets.” Cisco nods. He knows.

“I don’t like secrets.” Joe sighs. “I like Doctor Snow. Occasionally I like Doctor Wells.” He looks back at Cisco. “You’re the one I trust.”

It takes a lot not to puff up again at that. It’s a serious thing, serious the way Joe says it, with the Detective West look on his face.

“I need your help. Barry and me both.”

Cisco’s smile is gone by then. “Yeah. Name it.”

Joe hesitates. He glances around again.

Cisco figures out the problem fast. Secrets, and a lot of things in the building that Joe probably doesn't trust. He’s not sure it’s off base, either. “Hey, actually, how about we get out of here and look at those vinyls first?”

Joe smiles faintly, nods, like those words confirm something for him. “‘Look’ being the operative word. There will be no touching.”

“Looking will please me enough for one day.” Cisco sets his tools to the side and grabs his iPod from the speaker deck.

And they chat on about funk and the magic of the 1970s as they leave STAR and all its many secrets behind.


	5. Barry and Dante, gen

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Based on [this post](http://tiana-henderson.tumblr.com/post/119978280940/hows-dante). Mostly me getting out some of my constant Cisco-is-unappreciated feels.

“Barry Allen?”

Barry looked up from his microscope, used to being looked for by full name around the station. Probably some guy from the FBI there to pick up a box of evidence from some case that just went Federal. “Yeah, over here.”

The man who came in was in his twenties, dark-eyed and clean cut and good-looking. His wandering gaze found Barry and took him in. “So you’re the Flash, right?”

Barry straightened up with a jerk, immediately tense. “Excuse me?” Run or fight. Either one, he was ready, soon as he saw which way this was going to go.

The guy, strangely, just rolled his eyes. “Relax, hero. I’m Dante Ramon.”

No relaxing, not yet. But the name rang a bell. “Ramon. Oh. You’re…”

“Cisco’s my brother, yeah. I’m the one your psycho friends snatched up a few weeks back.”

Barry frowned, studying the man, still ready to react if he had to but at least his heart was slowing a little. “Those were no friends. Cisco said…are you…?”

Dante lifted his hands and waggled his fingers with a smile that might have been called charming if it wasn’t so tight. “They still ache a little, but no lasting damage, doc says.”

“I’m glad to hear that.”

“Really?” Dante’s hands dropped. He regarded Barry, and despite his words he still didn’t look particularly friendly.

Barry cleared his throat, eyes moving to the door to make sure nobody else was drifting too close to the CSI lab. “Hey, so…you know it’s a secret, right? I mean–”

“I’ve been meaning to pay you a visit.” Dante interrupted like he didn’t even hear Barry speak, looking around the lab in vague interest. “Check out who my bro hangs with these days, now that we’re…” He grinned. “Well, we’re trying it. The brother thing. Man, the stories he tells about what you guys are up to…” His smile froze for a second. “And yeah. He made sure I knew it was a secret. Give him some credit.”

“Yeah, okay. Good. I just–”

“So he tells these stories, and let me tell you, even though I saw parts of it for myself I still think he’s full of shit sometimes. I still think there’s no way all this stuff is actually happening. But the way he tells it, I know it’s true. Trips me out. Talks about you all the time, the things you can do. I gotta feel like I already know you a little bit, way he talks.”

Barry leaned back against the counter he’d been standing at when Dante arrived, watching him look around. Nosy brother, nothing to be alarmed about, right? But for some reason his instincts weren’t letting him relax entirely.

“Anyway, cool as all this stuff sounds, I had a taste of it and I was happy not to get anywhere near it again. These hands don’t do much these days, but I like ‘em where they are.” He wagged his fingers again with a grin towards Barry. “So I was okay keeping my distance. But the other day…he’s telling me this story, right? And he says something about you that I just can’t stop thinking about.”

“What was that?”

Dante turned to Barry. “That you remind him of me.”

Barry smiled faintly at that. “Hey, he’s like a brother to me, too.”

“You don’t get it, man. You don’t remind him of a brother, you remind him of _me_.”

“I…don’t…”

“You ever hear him talk about me before I got dragged into your crazy life?”

Barry frowned, but shook his head without much thought. He still remembered Cisco telling them about Snart torturing his brother, and how Barry’s first feeling had been surprise. He hadn’t realized Cisco had family.

Dante just nodded like he already knew the whole picture. “His apartment, it’s ten minutes drive from where me and our folks live. It’s not like we’re long distance or anything. But no, he never talked about me before. Because I’m a bastard.”

Barry blinked. 

“I have been all his life. He was smarter than me by a mile, he was braver than me. He didn’t care what anybody thought, he knew what he wanted to do and nothing was gonna stop him. And me, I didn’t have any of that. So I did what any bastard big brother does, I made his life hell for it.”

Dante moved around the table and leaned in to peer at a centrifuge in curiosity. “Maybe you don’t know how brothers are, but let me tell you: we can pull a lot of really foul stuff and feel totally okay about it. Used to tell myself I was toughening him up for the world, that it was my job. I made him into a joke in school, I turned his friends against him, stole his girl. Made him look bad with our folks. Su hermano mezquino.”

Barry regarded him with a frown.

“Him and me getting along, that’s still really new. A work in progress. So I gotta think hard when he tells me his best pal these days reminds him of me. Because the me he thinks about, that guy is a complete dick.”

“I am not–”

“Funny thing is, if you asked him about it he wouldn’t even realize it. In his head you’re like me because he’s got this love for you, this loyalty, where even when he wants to kick your ass he’ll still step between you and a bullet if he has to.”

Barry shook his head, straightening from his slouch, a little offended. “I may not know much about you and Cisco’s relationship, but I can tell you don’t know much about ours, either.”

“You made him team up with the guy who almost took my hands, didn’t you?”

Something hot - like anger, but less firm - welled up inside Barry. “That was an extreme case.”

“Was it? I don’t know. He keeps a lot of details to himself. I do know he had to deal with that cabron and his psycho sister again, and you didn’t even give him a head’s up first. I know he’s been going through some things, some bad things, and he won’t tell me about them because they’re not as cool as the stuff you do. But I see it in his eyes, he’s not sleeping right. I see it in the way he gets when I meet him out somewhere, like suddenly he’s nervous to be around people. I know his boss at the lab went psycho or something. And I know Cisco. I know what it takes for him to say anything about stuff like this. I taught him young there was no use crying about his problems, so I have to think when he lets something slip now that means it’s so damn big it’d probably have me on the ground.”

Dante approached Barry, dropping his attempt to feign curiosity about the lab. “I taught him to shut up when things went wrong. I taught him that it didn’t matter how he felt, I was gonna do whatever I wanted anyway. I taught him that there’s no such thing as real family, because I took his away from him. And you, Barry, you remind him of me.”

Barry winced even as his head started to shake. “Me and Cisco aren’t anything like–”

“Yeah, I don’t care. I’m not looking for an argument. I’m here as a favor, hero. This is me doing you a favor, because my little brother cares about you and it’s hurting him, more every time I see him. This is a warning, okay? And it’s probably the only one you’re gonna get.”

Barry tensed, but stuck his chin in the air and waited. He didn’t buy this, that he was anything like Dante Ramon, but he would listen to some threats if it got this jerk out of his lab.

Dante surprised him, though. His voice went softer, and his glare actually seemed misdirected. Like he meant to aim it right back at himself. “You keep reminding Cisco of me, and he’s gonna do the worst thing he possibly can, and you won’t even see it coming. He’s gonna  _leave_ , Flash. He’s gonna get tired of feeling the way he’s feeling now, and he’s gonna walk away. Trust me, I know from experience that that’s gonna hurt you more than you ever hurt him.”  

Barry wanted to argue. He’d been wanting to argue with every last word of it. But something about that self-directed glare and the way Dante’s voice went uneven made him hesitate.

Cisco was okay. He was upset, yeah, and worried, but they all were. They’d gone through a really bad few weeks. Maybe Dante just didn’t understand all that.

Maybe he did. Barry hadn’t exactly given Cisco warning about Snart, that was true. And he hadn’t really checked on him after Eobard Thawne nearly killed him. A few times. But that was…Cisco was fine. He was there at the lab making jokes same as ever. If his heart didn’t seem to be in it, that was just the circumstances.

Maybe. Barry thought so. But he didn’t _know_ , and until now he hadn’t given it any thought.

That was…that was really messed up.

Dante nodded suddenly, looking satisfied by whatever he saw in Barry’s expression. “Don’t take him for granted, hero. He’ll put up with it way longer than most people would. He’s a Ramon, we’re stubborn. But he’s still that strong kid he used to be, and eventually he’s gonna realize that he walked away from his real family and survived, so walking away from you won’t kill him either. And if you do that to him now that he’s got a place he belongs…”

He smiled, and there wasn’t a friendly thing about it. “Well. I’m that big a bastard to my own blood, how bad do you think I can be to a stranger? I’m ready to find out.”

Barry was the Flash, he was a superpowered metahuman who could do things no one else was capable of. He’d run mach two, phased his body through a truck. Stopped tornadoes and bullets and fires and he’d gone up against killers and literal monsters. Traveled through time.

But damned if he didn’t breathe a sincere sigh of relief when Dante Ramon turned and walked out of the lab.

Not because Dante was all that scary: Barry’s threshold for intimidation was way higher than it used to be. No, probably because whether he wanted to admit it or not, there was a good chance Dante was right.


	6. Cisco gen 5/1 ficlet

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> I nicknamed this _Five Times Cisco Didn’t Say What He Was Thinking (and the one time he did)_ on the tumblr post. Content warning for super sappy melodramatic angst because I was feeling a way that day. 
> 
> Written between seasons, before I knew Ronnie hadn't survived. ¯\\_(ツ)_/¯

“Have you done any research on a cure?”

He knows that Caitlin’s distracted. Her mind’s been on leaving for days, and now that the funeral is tomorrow she’s going to be on a jet with Ronnie for their long-overdue honeymoon the very next day. But she’s making a go of work.

Though ‘work’ is an iffy thing these days.

Still, when she peers up from her computer and regards Cisco, it might as well be just another day at the lab. “A cure?”

“Yeah.” He nods, leaning against the door frame and watching her, trying for casual. “For the metas.”

“You think I ought to research a _cure_ for dark-matter-altered DNA?”

Cisco thinks a lot of things that he doesn’t usually say. Loud-mouthed as he is, he likes empty words. They fill the silences but don’t take up space. 

“Just a thought. I mean. Like if we find someone else like Bette, maybe. Someone…good. Someone whose powers hurt them. Someone who doesn’t want to be a meta.”

Caitlin straightens from her slouch, considering the idea. “It would be a long shot.”

It is. He nods. But he would do it if he could. He spends almost all his time thinking about long-shots and developing things he shouldn’t be able to. He used to believe in impossible things, the way kids always do, even when he grew old enough to become disillusioned about the way the world really works. He still does, really. Enough that the idea of a cure doesn’t seem farfetched. He built a time machine, after all.

But she isn’t like him.

He wonders as he watches her think through initial ideas if she would be faster to say yes or no if she’d heard what Wells - _Thawne_ \- said to Cisco. If she knew he was maybe going to turn into one of the people they’ve been locking up. Would she want to help him?

Or would she consider it justice?

He killed Ronnie once, after all, and he’s got a pretty good idea that despite her sheepish apologetic words after she was whammied, she still feels that way deep down. The whammies don’t create anger, Barry told them after his own time under the spell. They reflect what’s already there.

He wants to approach her, confess what Eobard said, mention the little things that don’t feel quite right about his body, his mind, the dreams he has that are too loud lately, the dread that every heartbeat just puts him one step closer to becoming one of the bad people.

But she’s going on her honeymoon, and they’re going to Eddie’s funeral tomorrow, and there are bigger things happening. Worse things.

So he smiles and shrugs and backs out of the room to leave her to her work. “Don’t worry about. I was just wondering.”

 

* * *

 

_You broke their hearts when you went into the accelerator,_ he doesn’t tell Barry as he watches him pace around the treadmill room.

Barry’s obviously tense already. He’s been spending time at the lab even between metas, but Cisco thinks it’s just to stall having to go home. Things are probably pretty bad there. Joe’s mourning his partner, Iris is mourning her boyfriend.

Barry saved the entire world when he closed that wormhole, but nobody is celebrating. Not even Barry.

_You broke everybody’s heart,_  Cisco thinks as he watches Barry move. Even though Barry changed his mind, he still decided that he was willing to give up his relationships with every one of them in order to have one with his mother. And that says something. That’s hard to forget.

Cisco doesn’t say anything about it, of course, because what kind of judgmental prick is he for feeling hurt about a guy wanting his dead mom back?

“Is something happening?”

Cisco blinks and sees Barry looking at him through the observation glass that separates them. He grins, quick. “Not a thing, man. Slow days. Almost getting swallowed by a physics anomaly seems to have made even the bad guys want to take a few weeks off to think about things.”

Barry nods, already distracted again, and goes back to his pacing.

Cisco sighs and turns away from him, feeling dismissed. He wants to leave the observation room and go in, stop Barry and beg him to talk to him. He wants to ask what it feels like to be meta. If it’s a tingle under his skin that’s tangible. If Barry woke up from that coma feeling different somehow.

It’s got to have some kind of marker, doesn’t it? Being affected? Something more than waking nightmares that are really memories of things that technically never happened. More than how eerily simple and precise his work with sound waves has been lately. 

The vibrations of the universe, Eobard said. Cisco can’t feel it, so maybe it’s not true.

There’s a hum behind him as the treadmill turns on. Cisco doesn’t focus on the sound of it, on how his brain calculates the speed Barry’s running at based on the pitch of the hum coming off the belt. He never used to do that. He doesn’t think he _could_ do it before now.

He glances back at Barry through the glass.

He turns to leave Barry alone with his thoughts. He doesn’t ask about metas or time travel or whatever.

He doesn’t ask if Barry was going to let him die to get a confession out of Thawne, though every time he sees Barry lately that’s what he most wants to know. He won’t ever ask that, ever. Mostly because he’s scared what the answer might be. 

He doesn’t want to know how disposable he is.

 

* * *

 

He flinches when the shots are fired, and again, harder, the second round.

It’s a full funeral with police lined up in uniform and a huge flag draped over the empty coffin and everything. Joe fought hard for the last couple of weeks for this to happen. He had to testify about witnessing Eddie’s death and Cisco had to give a witness statement, and it was lies, all lies, because Eddie shooting himself wouldn’t count as a line of duty death. Nobody would understand the truth. For Eddie to get recognized as a hero, they had to lie about his heroics.

Cisco doesn’t mind those kinds of lies. 

He looks across the rows of uniforms to where Joe stands, stiff and wet-eyed, with his arm around Iris’s shoulders. She’s sobbing, shaking with it. At her other side Barry keeps looking at her, keeps tensing and looking away again. Not sure if he should comfort her, maybe, considering everything.

Cisco wants to sob, too. He hates all of this so, so much. Eddie dying right there on the ground in front of him, that’s something he’ll never forget. Watching Eobard Thawne dissolve into utter nothingness…that was pretty bad, too, though he feels guilty for feeling that way. Eddie was a hero, after all. Eobard was…

Cisco sighs and looks away from the Wests. Caitlin is sniffling beside him, but Ronnie’s holding her hand and murmuring to her, and they’re flying out tonight, and Cisco knows he doesn’t belong in their bubble.

When things break up, when Barry has led Iris from the crowd with the folded flag clutched to her chest and Joe hangs behind shaking hands with other cops, Cisco hangs back too.

Joe spots him and nods him over, and uses him as an excuse to get out of the middle of the uniform pack. “This is the second of these I’ve done in two years,” he says as he and Cisco walk slowly from the cemetery grounds towards the parking lot. “Two too many.”

“How do you do it?” Cisco asks before he can stop himself.

Joe glances over, eyes damp, looking drawn and tired and older. “What’s the alternative?”

“I don’t mean…” Cisco gestures back towards the crowd absently. “I mean all of it. How do you watch people die and have guns pointed at you and get hurt and get scared and still go in the next day and do it all again?”

How do you sleep, he doesn’t keep going, with the faces of the dead in your mind? How do you hear guns firing in salute at a funeral without seeing Eddie with red blooming across his chest?

How do you watch someone so much as lift a hand without flinching and going ice cold all over and feeling a fist squeezing your heart until it collapses in on itself? How do you look at your brother without seeing him black and cracked all over from frostbite? How do you listen to an insect buzz without feeling the jab of poison in your neck and feeling the next beat of your heart spreading that poison all through you?

How do you face _anything_ , when sometimes even a jet of water in the shower hitting your chest makes you feel the slide of a vibrating hand until you suddenly realize you’re curled up in the bathtub freezing because the water’s ice cold and it’s an hour later than it should be and you’re exhausted like you ran a marathon?

How do you look at Caitlin without seeing Ronnie on fire and half-crazed, or look at Joe without hearing him screaming your name for help when he’s kidnapped by a monster gorilla right under your nose? How do you drive to the Lab every day when it’s the place you died? How do you walk around in public, go to the store, leave a funeral service, without wondering if the criminal murderer who kidnapped you once is out there watching and biding his time?

How do people _live_? Cisco wants to ask because he feels like he’s forgotten lately. Everything hurts so frigging much. Work and home and everywhere else, silence and voices and every other sound, stillness that makes him shudder from suspense, and movement that makes him flinch in fear.

Joe says something in response, but Cisco only catches the tail end of it. Something about the job and how important the work is, how someone has to do it.

He wants to say so much, to ask so much, but he can’t. Joe just buried his partner. That’s so much bigger than nightmares and flashbacks and fear.

In the end he accepts Joe’s answer silently. He walks with him until the car’s in sight with Barry and Iris sitting inside and waiting for him. Cisco offers him a sad smile in goodbye and heads for his own car.

His hands shake when he sets them on the steering wheel so he just sits there for a while in silence, watching the mourners filing past.

 

* * *

 

“You wouldn’t have done it, I bet.”

Laurel laughs in his ear. It’s a harder sound than he remembers from her. “What, revealed Oliver Queen’s name to someone who was hurting my family? You bet your ass I would have.” Her voice softens after a moment. “It doesn’t make you a coward, Cisco. Some people just aren’t meant for…” She trails off.

He nods, holding the phone close as he slumps back against the wall. It’s stupid to even ask her about this, really. Cisco’s always known he isn’t a hero. He’s the sidekick, the tech guy, the support staff, and that’s it. He’s the one who confesses the hero’s identity, and lets the homicidal ex-coworker out of his cell. He’s the one who designs the gun that hurts the hero. Who seals the door on the hero. Who lets the hero get snatched in a sewer, or watches the hero shoot himself in the chest.

And it scares the hell out of him. Because if he’s not the good guy and he’s really going to turn into a meta himself, then what’s he going to become? Another Blackout, another Peekaboo? Or one of the ones who can’t possibly be redeemed, like Mist or Deathbolt? Every one of them, good or bad, was warped by their powers. Everything was magnified. And Cisco?

He’s scared, and he’s selfish. Two things that can get warped so easily. He doesn’t know what’s worse: fearing the outside world or fearing what’s happening under his own skin.

“Cisco?”

Laurel sounds like she’s said his name more than once. He blinks and clears his throat. “I’m here.”

“Look, there’s a couple of things I’ve learned in the last few months. One, the important people aren’t always the ones in the masks. And two, heroes are absolutely rotten at showing appreciation. So…whatever’s going on over there, whatever you’re worried about…let it go. You do good things. That’s what matters. Everybody here in Starling owes you something, including me, so if they take you for granted in Central City we’ll absolutely make a spot for you here. You’re a good guy, okay?”

_But what if I’m not_ , he doesn’t ask in response. _I hurt every good person in my life. I loved a remorseless killer like a father._ That’s not a hero’s origin story. It’s not a good guy’s track record.

He smiles all the same, so she can hear it in his voice. “Thanks.”

“You’re welcome.” From the slowness of her response maybe his fake smile wasn’t all that convincing. But she lets it drop all the same.  

Instead they talk about the Cry and how it’s working, since that’s the excuse he used to call her in the first place.

 

* * *

 

Iris doesn’t seem to realize she’s in public. She’s got her laptop on the table in front of her but she’s not even looking at it. Her gaze is to the side, unfocused, a thousand miles away.

Cisco avoids her table, taking his coffee to the staircase to head up and out of sight. She’s in mourning, she probably doesn’t want to be bothered. He’s kind of surprised she’s somewhere as loud and crowded as Jitters.

He glances back at her and frowns at the light shining off a streak of wetness down her cheek.

Then he’s heading to her table before he consciously makes a choice to go. Cisco’s flaws could fill a book thicker than The Order of the Phoenix, but he’s not the kind of guy who leaves a friend crying on her own in the middle of a public place.

He’s smiling as he reaches her table. “Hey, stranger.”

She stirs slowly, like she’s waking up. “Cisco? Hey, sorry, I didn’t see you.” She ducks her head enough to wipe fingertips under her eyes, and smiles wanly back at him. “How are you?”

He waves a hand. “Forget about me, how are you?”

Her smile falls away. “I’m…distracting myself.”

It’s not an answer but he accepts it, peering around at the laptop when she gestures to it. “Your blog?”

“You’ve read it?”

“Um, like every day, of course. You seem to know about these guys faster than we do most of the time.” He smiles, but it fades fast. A blog full of metas, the ones they’ve fought and a bunch more that are talked about through rumors and reader-submitted stories…and they’re evil. Not every single one, maybe, but enough to remind him of things he doesn’t want to think about. Odds and likelihoods and the things that might be building up under his skin.

Selfish jerk. He grits his teeth and focuses on her. “Anyway, whatever, it’s great. You’re a really good writer, you know. And I’m an old school sci-fi nerd, so I am an expert on stories about mysterious impossible things happening. Yours are great.”

She laughs. It’s small and perfunctory, but he still feels a little better once it’s out there. “Thanks. But it’s hard to take credit for writing something that’s not fiction.”

“But that’s what journalists do, right?”

She sighs and stares at the screen of her computer. “Sometimes I don’t know what good it does.”

“You could say that about anything anybody does. Sometimes it doesn’t do any good at all. But doing it keeps us going so we’re still there doing it in the times when it really does matter.”

He doesn’t mean to say all that, it sounds trite when he hears it coming out, but he believes it all the same. He has to. There’s so little to believe in anymore, he has to think that despite everything, despite who he is inside and what he’s becoming and how badly he’s hurt people, the good things he’s done still matter. The work is still important, even when it doesn’t seem to help.

“I resent this,” Iris says suddenly, still looking at her blog page. “Sometimes. Right now. The metas and the stories and everything. It feels like…it took Barry from me for nine months, and it made him and my dad so distant for such a long time, and now it’s taken Eddie.”

_I would have gone instead of him_ , Cisco stops himself from saying. He’s thought about it, though, and he really thinks he would have. If it would have helped anything, if it would have had the same effect.

It’s not fair that it was Eddie. Eddie had Iris and Joe and a job saving people. He had a life worth protecting. Maybe he thought he was useless in the end because he wasn’t going to be famous or do great things or whatever, but he would have realized eventually that being good is so much more noteworthy than being great. And he was good. He was really _good_.

Cisco isn’t. Not really. And he has so many karmic debts to pay for all the times he’s screwed up and all the people he’s hurt. And who knows, maybe that’s why he’s still here and Eddie isn’t. Life as a punishment. Payback for his crimes.

And that’s way too melodramatic and cynical to say out loud. His mood’s just been such shit lately it twists his thoughts now and then.

So, whatever, he doesn’t say anything at all. He smiles and touches her arm lightly, just for a quick second. He tells her to call if she needs anything, knowing that she won’t, and she smiles a sad goodbye and goes back to her blog as he walks away.

 

* * *

+1

 

“We used to eat lunch right over there.” Cisco nods at the picnic tables clustered around the edge of the small plot of grass outside the west rear doors. “Some of the engineers, I mean. Caitlin, too, when Ronnie could talk her into having lunch at all.”

The sun’s out, and the cool thing about STAR is that it’s so frigging spread out that all the tall downtown buildings are far away, and there’s nothing but blue skies overhead. In the distance is the huge security gate and a plot of outbuildings that store some of the old equipment or whatever, and beyond that is a parking lot that used to be full every day.

But this spot…it’s peaceful here. He’d forgotten about it until now, since there are no lunch breaks and no coworkers anymore. He spent a lot of good hours out here, nine times out of ten venting by making fun of Hartley Rathaway, to the appreciative laughter of every single person who ever had to deal with Hartley.

Good times.

He sighs and sits back on the grass, closing his eyes and tilting his face upward. “I have no idea if you would’ve liked this or not,” he says. “I don’t know what you liked at all, really. Which is so weird to realize. Anyway, it’s better than where you were, right?”

There’s no answer, but he’s not so far gone that he expects one. He does sit up, though, and shifts his crossed legs a little. He runs his fingers over the grass absently. “I wonder how different you would have been. I mean I guess he did a ton of research about you, so maybe he was pretty close, but that Doctor McGee didn’t seem to think so. I wonder if we would have gotten along.”

He smiles faintly, tugging up a few blades of grass to toy with, to give himself something to focus on. “Let’s face it, I would’ve been in just as much awe of the real you. I mean your stuff from before he took over, your articles and projects and just the talks you gave, they were amazing. I still YouTube those lectures you did at the U of M about particle recombination. Good stuff, man. That dry humor…Eobard had that down.”

Cisco drops the grass from his fingers and looks in front of him.

There’s no formal marker. That would be too hard to explain, and these days when nothing about the future is certain he can’t be sure there won’t be strangers tromping around back here, repurposing the place to become a huge megamall or something. Names and dates and stone would be a little on the nose.

What he’s done instead is plant little trees over each spot. There’s three now. He isn’t sure if they’re growing at all, it hasn’t been long enough, but they look kinda pretty. Small and thin, but it’s a start.

He put a fist-sized nugget of steel under Girder’s, a sample from the disaster at the Iron Works accident in Keystone. Blackout’s got one of Cisco’s old experiments underneath, a little portable generator the size of a smart phone that sits leaning against the stem. It works, the generator, but not efficiently enough to be any real use, so now it’s a gravestone for a guy who ate electricity. Maybe that’s corny. There’s no one to ask, though.

He’s still not sure what needs to go under this new one, the one he’s been talking to idly for the last half hour or so. Right now there’s just a pair of glasses sitting in the dirt under the freshly planted little tree. But that doesn’t feel right. He’s not even sure the real Harrison Wells needed the glasses.

“I don’t think you would have hired me,” he says, looking at those glasses glittering in the sunlight. “I don’t think you did, in whatever timeline he came from. He said he made our lives better by being here, me and Caitlin and Barry. And I mean it’s not like I was a great hire, I had a two year degree from Central City Community College, that was it. No way a guy like Harrison Wells should have given me a second look. I think maybe the real you wouldn’t have. I think I’d’ve ended up working at some manufacturing plant or whatever.

“I used to think I was so lucky, getting noticed and hired and ending up here, in this dream job. Now I wonder if I wouldn’t have been better off at a plant. There’s a few people right now who might still be alive if things went that way.”

He slouches, elbows on his knees, toying with the grass again but speaking, actually speaking his thoughts, because this is one listener who doesn’t have bigger things to worry about.

“I mean he came here to hurt Barry. Maybe that’s _why_ I’m here. Maybe he knew I’d mess so much up, and…” He stops, swallowing that down miserably. “Maybe I’m a form of sabotage. And now that I’m…I don’t even _know_ what I am now, but maybe I’ll be even worse.”

It’s self-pity, and he hates it, but he gets it out anyway because it feels like it’s clogging him up inside when he keeps swallowing it down.

“You had this line in that U of M talk, you said the greatest thing about science is that the more of it you know, the less of everything you understand. You were talking about facts and theories and how science never actually proves anything. And I always loved that. I love that people think of science as hard facts and cold formulas and all, but it’s really the opposite. There’s no truth in science, just theories that are really, really probable. The universe is a complete and utter mystery. Totally appealed to me when I was younger.”

He smiles at the tree, trying his hardest not to picture the rotted shell that’s buried underneath it. Christ, he wishes he didn’t know what death looks like.

“I think I hate that now. I think I’m tired of the whole world not making sense. I just want to understand. But every time I think I do, I’m wrong. Every time I think I know someone, I’m wrong. And now I don’t even have…whatever, myself, my own body anymore. There’s something happening inside me and I don’t know what and I’m really scared. I just…I want to understand. I don’t know if they’ll help me if things get bad. I don’t know if they’ll even notice. Any of them. He was going to let me die, he really was. I know it. I remember it. I play it back in my head and there’s no other explanation. And she hates me, I think. Maybe not so much now that Ronnie’s back, you know, but she blamed me all the same. Which I get, you know, I blame myself, but she said it was okay, she said I did the right thing, and I wanted to believe her so _badly.._.”

His eyes are hot now, his vision blurry as he stares hard at the grass between him and the little tree. “What does it mean, that I hurt the good people and help the bad ones? You think there’s some kind of genetic predetermination towards evil that means no matter how much I want to help, I’m only going to destroy things in the end? I thought I was a good person. I really did, I believed it. But now I don’t know anything. My two friends are the best, greatest people in the world, but they don’t even…I think they see me as…” He shakes his head, rubbing at his face and resenting the tears he scrubs from his cheeks.

“You want to hear something really dumb?” he asks the tree, all the trees. His silent audience of three. “I think what I want most right now, like right this very moment, is for someone to come out here and find me talking to the air like a crazy person. I mean, super embarrassing, sure, but at least it would mean that…”

But what would it mean? That someone was looking for him? Was that really all he was hoping for for himself?

Yeah, he realizes with a sigh and a glance back towards the exit doors and the utterly empty space behind him. That’s about all. 

Because when it comes down to it, whether Cisco is a meta or not, whether he’s good or evil, whether he should be alive or dead, none of that matters if he’s alone.

And of all the horrible things happening, all the nightmares and the death and the horror, the worst thing Cisco feels lately is that gaping loneliness of being surrounded by people he calls friends but still feeling like he exists in a vacuum. He likes empty words, he speaks them a lot, because they’re the only things insubstantial enough to carry to the outside world. They’re all anyone hears.

He lets out a breath and drops on his back in the grass, squinting up at the sunshine. Because, really, that’s more than enough of that. Though he does feel a little better having vented everything out instead of biting it back. Maybe that means the trees are really listening. 

Maybe he’s just really screwed up these days.

He lays there in the sunshine and listens to the silence and tries not to think about the vibrations of the universe. Nobody comes looking for him.


	7. Cisco/OMC - Joe's new partner

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Inspired by [this post](http://fauxsciencedork.tumblr.com/post/137781767017/scarylibrary-greenglowsgold-thenarator) about whose turn it was to fall in love with Joe's new partner, since Iris and Barry had their turns.

Singh was standing in front of his desk in his office as Joe approached. There was someone in there with him: all Joe could see was broad shoulders and ink-dark hair and a nice cut suit, but he didn’t recognize those details enough to put a name to the man.

He lifted his hand to knock on the door, but Singh caught sight of him and waved him in. “Joe West. We were just talking about you. Come meet someone.”

Joe moved in, smiling politely, half sure he already knew what this was. Patty got on the train two weeks ago. Really, it was overdue. He noted the badge on the man’s hip, and yep, this was definitely…

His gaze moved up even as he held out a hand to shake the man’s, and his thoughts stopped dead.

Singh kept talking, saying a name, saying something about ‘transfer from Chicago’s…’ whatever, but Joe’s brain had fried. He barely remembered to reclaim his hand when this stranger, this – _Jesus –_ this _person_ shook and then let go.

“So I thought he should ride around with you while he’s learning the–”

“No.”

Singh blinked. “Excuse me?”

“No. No way. Nope. Sorry, Captain, I…” Still shaking his head, Joe turned and marched right back out of that office.

Hell no.

Singh was on his heels a minute later, putting a none too gentle hand on Joe’s shoulder and pulling him to a stop. “What the hell is wrong with you, Joe?”

“Me?” Joe turned on him, keeping his head enough to at least glance around and make sure no one was within earshot. “Are you trying to kill me, David? Are you honestly trying to get me killed right now?”

Singh’s anger melted into mild confusion. “What are you—”

“The last two partners you’ve given me have ended up dating my kids. Do you have any kind of idea what that does to a man’s heart? Iris and Eddie were almost _engaged._ I had Patty all up in my life at all hours, and Barry’s moping around now that she’s gone. Are you doing this on purpose? Have I wronged you?”

Singh blinked. His mouth twitched. “Patty Spivot was your call, need I remind you.”

“Fine. Mea culpa. Let me rectify that part mistake now: there is no way in hell I am taking that man as a partner. I am exhausted, I’m too old for this soap opera crap, okay? No.”

“You seriously just walked out of my office because Shahir is attractive?”

“Shahir, Christ. I walked out because I’m an old man and I have no patience for this. I am not inviting that… _person_ into my already-dramatic life. Forget it.”

Singh was outright smirking by then. “Maybe he’s not Iris’s type?”

“He’s _my_ type!” Joe pointed an accusing finger towards Singh’s office. “And I am _straight,_ David.”

“Okay, yes, fine, he’s a good-looking–”

“Captain.”

Singh glanced back towards his office, where a brown-skinned dark-eyed living statue of any god, just any damned one, named, apparently, Shahir, was waiting. He sighed after a moment. “Worst part of it is he’s a genuinely great guy. Funny, too.”

Joe groaned heartily.

“Smart, good cop. Great solve rate in Chicago.”

“Stop.”

“I’m not gonna send him back to Illinois for being beautiful, Joe, and you’re my only detective without a partner. So. Apologies in advance for the soap opera or sexual epiphany or whatever this is going to bring to your life, but he’s yours. That’s that.”

Joe scowled at the office and back at Singh. “I quit.”

Singh chuckled and clapped him on the shoulder. “Come on, Joe, come meet your partner.”

 

* * *

 

It was worse than Joe feared.

Shahir Amin was of Egyptian descent, with skin only a couple of shades lighter than Joe’s and curling black ridiculous hair. Light, almost hazel eyes, full _ridiculous_ lips that always seemed to be smiling.

It was horrible.

There was a betting pool in place in the squad room before the week was out, once an overly-friendly lieutenant from Robbery got Shahir to admit to being single. Who was the lucky first who’d score a date with the man and welcome him to Central City properly? Everyone got involved, from the civilian aides manning the phones to the old dogs behind desks who’d been there longer than Joe. They either had a horse in the race or were actively trying to be part of it themselves. Male, female, barely seemed to matter.

Joe himself, aside from an appreciative 'damn’ every now and then in the back of his mind, didn’t have any late-onset sexual fluidity to deal with. So that was one relief. But on duty they started getting repeat calls to the same businesses, 'sightings’ of metas from worried witnesses who only wanted to give their statements to Shahir, and the squad room had a ridiculous number of visitors moving through it that first couple of weeks.

The first time Iris came in to bring Joe coffee, Joe drew up every ounce of strength he had and grimly introduced her to his new partner.

He could see the appreciation in her eyes, damn it, as she took Shahir in and shook his hand. His face was stone as he saw a matching interest in Shahir’s eyes. They talked for a few minutes, laughed a little, and Joe was too much a disapproving statue to hear a word of it.

When she left, patting Joe on his solid rock shoulder, he stared at Shahir.

Shahir only laughed, raising his hands harmlessly. “She seems to take after you.”

And that was that. Iris asked about him now and then, interest in her eyes, but it never seemed to go anywhere solid.

Barry, Christ, Joe didn’t think he had to worry about Barry. But he went up to the labs one day to see what was taking Shahir so long grabbing some test results, and found Barry up against his desk, beaming inanely, pink-faced and fumbling with papers as he laughed too loudly at whatever Joe’s partner was saying.

He even jumped when Joe cleared his throat, like he’d been caught doing something wrong.

When they headed downstairs, test results in hand, Joe couldn’t help but ask, “Do you even notice the reaction you get from everybody?”

“Since I hit puberty and shot up ten inches in eighteen months. And I abuse the hell out of it when I need to,” Shahir answered with an easy smile. “You’ll be surprised how much it helps out on the job.”

Joe nodded, because he’d already seen it a time or two before. “Well. No using it on my foster son.”

“Barry? Hey, no, of course not. He seems like a good kid.”

The descriptor made Joe heave a sigh of relief.

“I know about the pool, too, by the way.”

Joe looked over at Shahir, and relaxed enough to chuckle. “Want me to be your proxy, place a bet? You could clear a couple hundred as it stands right now.”

“No thanks.” But he thought about it a moment and grinned at Joe. “Actually, I’ll let you know.”

 

* * *

 

As partners went he was a good one. Joe had a difficult time keeping everything secret that needed to stay secret, but Shahir was decent about giving him space when he asked for it and taking him at his word when he had information about a crime that they hadn’t learned through normal means.

He seemed to take the metahuman problem in stride, too. Even the first time he saw one – a woman who could affect her own gravity enough to basically fly – he just laughed and said it was a good thing they’d warned him in advance or he’d be checking for hidden cameras.

The guy quoted philosophers and poets, and ate healthy, and was fluent in at least three different languages that had come up on crime scenes or interviews. He came from money, in his tailored suits and a thousand dollar watch Joe rolled his eyes whenever he saw.

But as days turned into weeks, and Iris and Barry made occasional comments but seemed to have no luck (like everyone else) in attracting his interest, Joe relaxed a little bit and started to enjoy getting to know the man.

 

* * *

 

 

Joe didn’t even think to worry about Wally until Wally and Shahir were face to face. But God help him, new partner, new kid, both at around the same time? He should have worried.

He had no idea what Wally was into, relationship-wise. Just a casual mention from Iris that when she showed him around the paper he and Linda had seemed to hit it off. Or at least made a noble effort at out-smart-assing each other.

Now it was too late. Early call to an illegal street race, which Joe took because he was suddenly taking every call about a race in Central City, and there he was.

Luckily the racers had either been wrapped up for the night or got enough heads-up about the cops being called to make it look like nothing was going on, because there was nothing to arrest anyone for. Which left Joe calling the station while Shahir helped the uniformed officers break up the crowd that was left.

When Joe finished and got out of the car, there was Wally and Shahir, face to face, talking intently. He felt the shiver of misgivings, because this was the one kid whose life he had no legitimate say in, the one he couldn’t even _advise_ about the dangers of dating a cop.

Then again maybe he was jumping to conclusions again, because when he approached Wally’s full focus went to him, and Shahir just backed up to give them a few minutes to talk.

Still.

Something had to give sooner or later, damn it. Joe didn’t have the kind of luck that would keep things easy and simple and non-complicated, the way he wanted them to be.

 

* * *

 

It got to the point that Joe could just laugh it off when someone new met his partner and went instantly starry-eyed and incoherent.

Cisco Ramon, for instance, when he showed up at the station one day to work a few hours in his second job as scientific adviser.

“Hey, Joe!” He ended up coming in just as Joe and Shahir were set to leave, to take a follow-up call on a kidnapping attempt. Casual as ever in his jeans and brightly-tacky t-shirt, hair down, bright grin on his face.

“Hey, Cisco.” Joe smiled, because it was damn hard not to smile back at Cisco Ramon. “Oh, you haven’t met my new partner yet, have you?”

Cisco could always be counted on for an entertaining reaction, and meeting Shahir was no different. He glanced at Shahir and did an actual double-take before he stuck his hand out to shake. He said “He- _llooo_ ,” in a way that was too over the top to be serious, and heaved a dramatic sigh once Shahir let go of his hand.

“Welp, that was a high point. Now, where’s Barry, I gotta run through some scenarios with him.”

And then he was gone.

Joe really enjoyed that kid sometimes.

What he didn’t expect was to turn back to Shahir once Cisco left and see his partner looking completely stunned.

“Who was _that_?”

“Cisco? He consults with the department sometimes, particularly around metahuman issues. Capture, containment, stuff like…” He trailed off, frowning. Shahir was looking wide-eyed, a little unfocused. He looked an awful lot like how he usually left other people looking. “He’s a friend,” he amended.

“Really?”

“Of a lot of the cops around here, actually.” Joe studied him, the way Shahir was still mostly focused on the stairs they last saw Cisco on. “I know him pretty well. He and Barry are close.”

“Yeah?”

“I think they bonded over their secret lives as supervillains, laying the city to waste and whatnot.”

“Uh huh.”  

He ended up closing the space between he and his partner and waving a hand in front of Shahir’s eyes. When Shahir finally blinked and looked away from the stairs, Joe laughed. “Cisco? Really? Everybody in this city basically throwing themselves on you and…Cisco?”

Shahir just shrugged, not bothering to deny any of it. “He smiles like the sun coming out from behind clouds.”

Joe considered that, but clapped Shahir on the shoulder. “A poet and a cop, such a complicated man.”

“Okay, go to hell, but introduce us first.”

“I just did.”

“I mean for real.”

Joe laughed. “I’ll consider it. He’s still one of my kids, you know. In a way. First, though, we’ve got things that need doing.”

“The case, right.”

“Absolutely.” Joe considered Shahir, and remembered how Cisco’s eyes went soft and wistful as he’d let Shahir’s hand go. “I do have one thing to do first. Give me five minutes.”

Shahir was already looking back towards the stairs as he left.

 

* * *

 

When news spread that Cisco Ramon and Shahir Amin had a genuine up and coming dinner-and-a-movie date approaching, a lot of people around the station were heartbroken.

Joe? Joe was nearly two hundred dollars richer.


	8. Linda/Cisco/Iris - explicit

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Written for Cisco Ship Week for both the rare pair and polyamory days. Sexy times.

“Blond at the bar?”

“He looks like an ex of mine, no thanks. Ginger, three o’clock.”

“I’m pretty sure that girl beside him would object.”

“…she can come too.”

Iris laughs and turns on her stool to face Linda. She isn’t entirely sure how serious her girlfriend is when she says things like that. She’s not entirely sure how serious she _wants_ Linda to be.

This game is a new one, but it’s been a fun diversion their last couple of nights out: who would they invite home for a night? Guys only (or, apparently, couples that include guys), since their only lack in the bedroom is an actual flesh and blood dick. ‘And sometimes you just kinda crave that,’ Linda has said. ‘You know?’

Iris knows.

She’s never had a relationship with a woman before, and it’s funny: with her last few boyfriends, the penetration part of sex has always been the most underwhelming for her. She was all about foreplay, and hands, and mouths. But with Linda, as amazing as she is with hands and mouth (and she is, she really really is), Iris finds herself missing the feeling of being stroked deep inside. Toys are fun, but not the same.

So she plays along. Linda’s far more likely to be serious than to be joking, and if they spot someone who catches both their eyes…well. Maybe. It’ll be something new, but then all of this is new, and Linda hasn’t steered her wrong yet.

Linda’s maybe the best thing that’s happened to Iris in a long, long time.

“Wait. Oh my God.”

Iris twists to follow Linda’s suddenly sparkling eyes, and she blinks in shock. “Not…”

“The short one, with the hair. Yes.”

“But–”

“Oh christ, look at that smile. God, the innocent ones are the absolute best.”

Iris gapes for a moment out across the bar, because the short one with the hair and the smile is Cisco Ramon, of all people.

“I know him,” she says, feeling either horrified or amused, hard to tell which.

“Really? That’ll make it easier.”

Iris turns to Linda. “He’s Barry’s friend, okay?”

Linda shrugs without missing a beat. “And if Barry finds out he’ll have something to sob about to his boring, bland, blond boytoy.”

“Hey!” Iris laughs, though, because as much as she loved him before the end Eddie really is pretty bland. Besides, mention of Eddie and Barry’s spite-relationship never fails to amuse her.

(Barry admitted the spite part to her, moaning that they only started hanging out together because Eddie was sure Iris left him for Linda (not true, but Linda came soon after the breakup) and Barry was rebounding from the relationship with Iris that he would never actually have (she wouldn’t date anyone who had lied to her as much as he had, and there was a part of her that was still heartbroken about that missed chance though no part of her doubted that it was the only choice she could make), but now it was all ‘I really like him, and I think he likes me, but I don’t know how to ask out a guy I’ve been fake-dating for weeks!’)

“He is over twenty-one, isn’t he?” Linda says, and Iris realizes she’s still scoping Cisco out.

Iris glances back at him. She’s never thought about Cisco as a…well, as a _man_ before, in the physical sense. He’s Barry’s friend. He’s the guy at STAR who would keep her company when she visited Barry in his come, who started stocking up on herbal teas because she liked hot drinks but was permanently tired of coffee working at Jitters.

He’s sweet, but he’s Barry’s.

She looks at him now, speculative. He does look incredibly young, standing at the bar chatting with the bartender. But the drink the guy slides across to him is alcoholic, so. Over twenty-one.

He _is_ cute. She used to go for bigger and broader, but being with Linda’s given her more of an appreciation for slighter bodies.

She considers him.

Part of him being Barry’s is that he’s part of Barry’s lies. And she knows this whole game is…nothing, a whim on Linda’s part, something that probably won’t even pan out, but she still has no interest in dealing with dishonesty, even for a night of possible fun.

She turns back to Linda, who’s still watching Cisco with openly interested eyes. Linda really does have a thing for the innocent ones. She told Iris once that she was attracted to Barry when she saw him standing at a bar trying feebly to get the attention of some lady-killer bartender. It was that wide-eyed uncertainty that drew her in.

Iris has never known anyone with an innocence kink, but Iris has been so close to Barry for so long that she understands it.

She slides off the stool, flashing a smile that she hopes is playful. “Why don’t I go say hi. See what his plans are.”

Linda straightens, delight in her eyes. “Go get ‘im, sexpot.”

Iris shakes her head with a laugh, but there’s a swing in her hips as she saunters around the bar. She can feel Linda’s eyes on her, openly appreciative, and it makes her smile as she turns the corner and approaches Cisco.

He’s sitting on his own, still chatting with the bartender cheerfully, but he sees her coming out of the corner of his eye and he lights up that much more. “Hey, Iris!”

She has a plan in mind, but it’s impossible not to return that smile. “Hey, I thought it was you. What are you doing here?”

Cisco shrugs and lofts his drink. “Lousy day.”

Iris glances back across the corner of the bar to where Linda’s sitting. Linda beams at her, wags her eyebrows.

Iris turns back to Cisco. “You can still smile like that after a lousy day?”

“It’s nighttime. That’s what it’s for, to shake off the bad days.”

She smiles at that. “You meeting anyone?”

“Nah. Barry’s spending time with the boyfriend we’re not supposed to know about, and Ronnie’s in town which means Caitlin’s busy constantly, and.” He shrugs.

Iris resists the urge to glance back at Linda again, because this is where her plan goes into effect and it’ll either make or break whether Linda is even introduced to Cisco or not. “Hey, so, speaking of things we’re not supposed to know about…”

Cisco turns on the stool to face her. “Uh huh?”

She lowers her voice, her eyes steady on his. “Barry is the Flash.”

Cisco blinks, and lets out a breath. His smile goes huge. “Oh man, am I glad they told you finally! I did _not_ understand that whole secrecy thing. I mean, whatever, not my secret, not my decision, but damn.”

There’s not an instant’s hesitation or a flicker of anything but relief in his eyes. And that’s what Iris needs to see, the sincerity. The happiness. That’s how she should have been welcomed into this whole thing, damn it.

“Nobody told me. I figured it out. There was a picture…” She shrugs. A wild, spontaneous decision to snap an image on her phone, but it worked. Linda had helped her digitalize and sharpen it until the Flash’s face became undeniably familiar to them both. 

“Oh.” His smile goes crooked for a moment, but he shrugs. “Welp, I always told Barry and Joe, you know, I wouldn’t tell you the truth but I wouldn’t lie if you asked me outright. So good for you.” He lofts his glass in toast.

Iris returns the smile uncontrollably. There’s something really sweet about Cisco Ramon, always has been. She’s always been happy to see him, even if they haven’t talked very much before now. He reminds her of Barry in some ways.

“Do you want to join us?”

He doesn’t even ask who she’s with, just grabs his drink and slides off the stool. “Sure! I am so lousy at being on my own.”

“I’m the same way,” she says as she leads the way around the bar. “I’d rather be with people I don’t like that much than be alone, at least when I’m out.”

“Exactly! It’s like an energy thing, like…diffusion. You need someone to bounce yourself off of otherwise you just spread out all over the place.”

She laughs. “Interesting way to put it.”

Linda’s watching them coming, and her eyes are glowing as Iris reaches her. “Hey.”

Iris slides her hand through Linda’s and returns the smile, and it takes her a moment to remember Cisco’s standing right there. She blinks and turns to him. “Cisco, Linda. Linda, Cisco Ramon.”

“Linda…?” Cisco blinks at her, and at their hands, and at Iris. “Okay, just for the record, not trying to jump to conclusions here, but…did you and Barry just like switch partners?”

Linda answers, but her eyes and her words are towards Iris. “What do you think?”

Iris glances at Cisco. He’s cute, god knows, and he’s sweet. He’d be easy to direct. And she’s not dangerously attracted to him in any way that would threaten to make things awkward. She turns back to Linda and sees the desire in her eyes, and remembers the predatory way she smiled when she first described Cisco. The innocent ones are the best.

She would eat Cisco Ramon alive.

And there’s a very real, currently very warm and aware part of Iris West that wants to see that happen.

They started talking about this whole thing, about finding a man to bring home for a night, for one very specific reason: dick. Both Linda and Iris are bisexual, and both enjoy being well fucked. They want for nothing on their own, of course, and if this talk never went anywhere and they stuck with toys and fingers and mouths Iris would be perfectly happy.

But now she wants something new. She wants to watch Linda taking her pleasure from someone, she wants to watch her strong, blunt girlfriend using a man to take exactly what she wants, and to give Iris what she needs. She wants to see this innocence kink in action.

And Cisco Ramon is the perfect wide-eyed angel-faced guy to make that happen.

She meets Linda’s eyes and she smiles.

Linda grins back, reading her expression, and then she turns to Cisco and speaks in her no-nonsense snap of a voice. “Okay, here’s the deal. Iris and I are together, and that’s how things are. But we’d be open to having a guest star on our show for a night. And you, little man, are _precious._ ”

Cisco blinks. He blinks at Linda, he twists his head and blinks at Iris. He laughs, small and thin, and when neither of them return the laugh or admit it’s a joke, he just blinks again.

He lifts his glass and drains his drinks in quick swallows, and sets it on the bar between them. “Okay, so. Wait.”

“Nope. No waiting. Sit with us and have a couple of drinks and - unless you turn out to be a jerk - come back with us to my place. Or else scurry off and we’ll keep looking around.”

Iris can’t help it, she adores Linda when she’s in boss mode. Linda more than anyone Iris has ever known knows what she wants all the time, and takes steps to get it the moment she realizes she wants it. It’s why her eyes switched from Barry to Iris so fast, and why Iris didn’t stand a chance once that gorgeous woman had her locked in her sights.

From the way Cisco’s throat worked he seemed to find it kind of a turn-on too. He shrugged and smiled weakly and blushed when his gaze went to Iris. “I suppose if this turns out to be a prank I’ll only have hurt feelings. Sign me up.”

 

* * *

 

He’s adorable, sure, but Iris isn’t sure she finds Cisco Ramon all that _sexy_. Then again that’s really not the point. Linda draws her eyes, her attention, her desire, and there’s no room for anyone else in Iris’s mind, not when Linda’s there.

Cisco in their bed is strangely simple. He seems to have rapidly picked up on the idea that his role is to be a glorified sex toy, and the enthusiasm he greets that idea with makes the whole process completely painless. He lets Linda order him around, he shuts his mouth, he strips down and moves where they want him and keeps his hands to himself unless directed otherwise.

Most importantly, he gets hard for them before they even get home, and they’re delighted to find that once he comes he’s ready to go again in just a few minutes.

And everything he does is with this wide-eyed wonder, like he’s won the lottery just being there.

It’s gratifying. Iris’s focus is on Linda, but when she’s riding Cisco with Linda pressed behind her palming her tits and mouthing at her neck, she can’t help but notice Cisco watching them like they’re goddesses brought to life. She responds to that. She warms and she slows her hips and draws things out that much more.

He groans like he doesn’t want to invade their space, trying to bite it back and muffling it with his hand and basically being…well, considerate.

It’s perfect really. It’s everything they talked about. It’s Iris and Linda, their time, their bodies, their pleasure, with just a new toy to shake things up for a night. When they pass out Iris curls against Linda and mouths her sweaty skin and falls asleep just like that, and Cisco stays on his side and is gone in the morning.

 

* * *

 

He leaves a note with his phone number on it, ‘just in case, lol’ written underneath, which makes Linda roll her eyes so hard.

But it’s only a couple of weeks before Iris comes home from work late and finds Linda sitting there with Cisco’s crumbled note in hand. She lofts it so Iris can recognize it and raises an eyebrow.

Iris smiles.

He brings dinner when he arrives. He’s grinning as he lofts the bags. “I was gonna make breakfast when I got up first that morning, but I didn’t, and then I felt guilty for not, so. Chinese.”

Linda just rolls her eyes again, but she smiles all the same. Iris knows her: innocence kink, and she’s got to have a thing for goofy people because Barry and Iris both fit that category more than occasionally.

They split egg rolls and kung pau chicken and some dish Iris has never heard of but it’s spicy and amazing. They chat, about Barry and Flash things and about the paper, and he tries to explain some kind of project he’s working on but it’s over Iris’s head. From the way Linda’s eyes get glassy it’s over her head, too, but it’s still turning her on to hear about it.

And the night goes as easily as the first time.

He keeps his hands to himself unless they’re placed somewhere by one of the two women, he does what he’s told, he gets hard and stays hard and gets hard again when they need him to.

Linda fucks him, her back to him as she rides his cock, and Iris kneels between his legs and holds her, kisses the gasps from her mouth, works her fingers against her clit until she’s cursing and grinding down on the body beneath her.

It’s them. It’s Iris and Linda, it’s very much their night. That’s what Iris was most worried about when they first started joking around about bringing someone home. Most men she knows wouldn’t have been so agreeable to this. In theory every smirking dude is going to agree to go home with two sexy women, but in action? Most will either make it about themselves or get in their feelings about being neglected and never come back.

Cisco only speaks out of turn once, when Linda’s rolled off him and Iris is left there between his legs, wet and eager and waiting for him to be ready for more. He licks his lips and speaks with hunger in his voice. “You know I could…”

Linda swats his arm. “Hey.” But she glances at Iris and guesses what he meant and laughs, exhausted but amused. “Honey, trust me, you couldn’t do a thing with your tongue that we don’t already know how to do to each other, and much better.”

Iris nods her agreement, and grins as Linda takes just the idea of Cisco’s mouth on her woman as a challenge, and drags herself up and crawls to Iris to prove her point.

* * *

It turns into a regular thing. When they call, he shows up, usually with food. Once it’s a bag of groceries, because he did start making breakfast for them the morning before that but discovered that two busy women like them have the refrigerator contents of college-aged bachelors.

That next morning he leaves them breakfast burritos in the microwave that are so good Linda talks about hiring him on, and she’s only mostly kidding.

Once or twice he can’t make it because of some Flash-related metahuman crisis, and Iris always calls him for a scoop the next day. Once he can’t make it because he has an actual date, and he’s so excited and enthusiastic about it that Iris and Linda can’t help but be giddy for him.

He’s a sweet guy, after all. He’s nice, he’s kind, he’s still innocent in a lot of ways. He doesn’t take having sex with Iris and Linda as some sign that he’s allowed to become gross and handsy and lecherous with them, which is nice. And he hasn’t told anyone anything about what they do at night. Not that Iris has heard, and he swears he hasn’t.

“Not bragging about it was kinda hard for a while in a totally petty way, I admit, but then I realized, you know…who’d even believe it? So whatever.”

The next time they get together after his date, they’re sweaty and exhausted before Iris remembers to ask him how it went.

He just shrugs and smiles at them tiredly and says he’s not good with women and they should just leave it at that. And he rolls on his side away from them.

She only finds out later, when Barry lets slip that this girl Cisco was going out with was trying to get close to the Flash. Apparently it’s not the first time, either.

She tells Linda, and Linda calls Cisco, and it’s the first time they get together twice in a week. They don’t say anything to him about it, but they do get a bit more effusive with compliments than usual, until he’s red-faced and his eyes can’t meet theirs.

 

* * *

 

Iris’s dad gets hit over the head on the job, and she rushes to the hospital to see Barry and the STAR crew already there, which means it was some kind of metahuman who did it, which terrifies her. 

It’s Cisco who pulls her aside and calls Linda to come be with her, distracting her in the meantime with a completely random story about how once in college he was tutoring a senior for a chemistry exam (Cisco was a freshman), and when the guy passed he was so grateful he offered to get his dad to pay for Cisco’s next term. Which was tempting, Cisco admits, casual and smiling and trying not to let the hospital around them draw Iris’s focus too much. “But who wants to spend the rest of their life thinking that they wouldn’t be who they were if Chad Bindleworthy’s father hadn’t bought them a semester of school?”

Iris manages a laugh, mostly at the idea that that’s someone’s real name, and Linda shows up and her dad is pronounced fine, and things settle down as fast as they kicked up.

She doesn’t forget that Cisco was there for her, though.

The next time they get together she asks him what he wants most, which surprises him. He flushes dark and squirms on the mattress, and says “I really like using my mouth.”

Linda giggles at the idea. “Maybe for your birthday, kid.”

 

* * *

 

“I like him,” she tells Iris later, once they’re alone and enjoying each other. “I want to keep liking him, and I’ve had enough fumbling half-assed guys gnawing at my vag to never want to go through it again, okay?”

Iris can’t help but laugh. Eddie was her most frequent partner before Linda, and he was tentative and asked a lot of questions and worked on it, but never really got confident enough to let her see stars. She trusts Linda’s opinion that things get much worse than that.

 

* * *

 

She notices Cisco. Now that she knows about Barry she’s started marching her way to STAR and getting involved in the crises of the day before they become headlines. She has to keep an eye on her best friend, after all. God knows she’s been his voice of reason his entire life. A superpowered Barry Allen is just a Barry Allen that has a thousand more ways to throw himself into danger every day. It’s bad for her heart, really.

She goes, and she sees what happens there, and it’s interesting. She’s never really seen Cisco in his element before. He talks sometimes about his projects, but seeing him working is a whole different thing. He’s a genius. She didn’t doubt it before, but it’s undeniable now. He imagines up ideas and simply builds them from the ground up, whether they involve making Barry’s costume more injury-resistant, designing a weapon, building a Ghostbusters-style proton pack (his name, not hers) when they come up against a meta who can make themselves insubstantial, ghostlike, and almost uncatchable. He sees something in his head, and he bends fabric and metal and hard drives until the thought is real. And they always work.

She can’t help but notice that he might have been speaking honestly about having himself something of an oral fixation. He’s always got something in his mouth at the lab, candy of some kind, pens, straws, tools. She notices it then can’t stop noticing it, to the point where she starts feeling a little flushed while she watches him.

Linda laughs when Iris reports back to her about that. “Look, here’s your options: you can enjoy yourself watching him and thinking dirty thoughts, or you can go ahead and let him have at you and be completely disillusioned about it. It’s your call.”

“You don’t mind the idea of…” Iris loves sex, she has it with a regularity that might be called obsessive, but sometimes she still can’t talk about it with Linda’s easy bluntness. “I mean, we agreed he would be there for one reason only.”

“Iris, baby, I am not going to feel threatened if you wrap your legs around his neck. Even if by some miracle he’s good at it. Promise.”

Linda always tells the truth, so Iris grins and flattens her and rewards her for…whatever, for being her. For being sexy and incredible and for striding through life taking everything she needs. And for deciding Iris was one of those things.

 

* * *

 

Iris feels oddly nervous as she nudges Cisco further down the bed. She moves up his body, straddles his face, and she tells him to have fun.

He lets her come after an eternity that Linda tells her later was closer to about twenty minutes, but she twitches and gasps and hums in pleasured aftershocks for far longer than that.

Linda doesn’t miss a beat. Seeing what he’s done to Iris she simply lays down, spreads her legs, points, and orders him over. He goes happily.

It’s easier to tell what’s happening as an observer, and Iris is wrapt by the sight of it. Cisco looks happier than he’s ever been with them before, his mouth always working, flashes of tongue and lips and teeth as he explores her inside and out, thoroughly, rhythmically, voraciously. He loves this, she can see it on his face, and Linda is reduced to a whining, writhing mess in minutes.

His tongue, jesus. Iris sees flashes and feels the ghost of it on her, inside of her, and she shivers.

He’s enthusiastic, and god he’s a quick learner. He finds that spot that makes Linda growl all the way down in her chest, the spot Iris loves exploring, and once he’s got it once he goes back again and again. Always shaking it up, always letting her build up until she’s twitching and then changing things up again.

She arches off the bed, her hands fisting his hair and holding him against her when she finally comes.

He sits back, wiping dampness from his face and glowing like he’s the one that just got sent to the moon.

Linda just points at him, almost accusing, when she’s got her breath back. “You,” she says, her voice husky and uneven, “are allowed to speak now.”

Cisco beams at them, openly proud of himself, and asks who’s ready for round two.

 

* * *

 

It’s only a matter of logistics once they’ve given Cisco permission to speak in bed. It isn’t long before he’s been given allowance to touch, and though it takes him a while until he’s really comfortable taking advantage of his new allowances, it’s really just the first steps down a slippery slope.

Because Cisco is openly adoring and fascinated once he’s got leave to do what he wants.  Because he’s brilliant and he can hypnotize them both by focusing on the curve of Linda’s hip, or the cream softness of Iris’s thigh, and he strokes and touches and tells them all about how their bodies are made of the entire universe, and how the whole 13-billion-year history of the universe has been building to this, to them, to the miracles of their bodies and their laughs and the way they shiver under his fingers.

Even Linda loves it, because he says it like science, not sentiment. His hands are the hands of an engineer, not some playboy. And his mouth is a miracle for a whole other reason.

Iris never thought there was anything missing with her and Linda. They didn’t go out cruising for a dick because they had to have dick. They had to have each other, that was it. They were happy on their own, complete, more than satisfied with each other.

But people aren’t yin and yang. Just because the curves of Iris and Linda fit together so well doesn’t mean there are no curves left to fit anyone else against.

They don’t need dick; they just wanted to have some fun. But once they have Cisco, they need him.

She realizes it one day when she wakes up and Cisco is still asleep beside her. They get through a morning chatting and getting ready to get their days going, and it feels utterly right for him to be there, away from the bed, sharing what Iris and Linda already share.

Linda gives him a key soon after that, and tells him that the next time some pretty girl chats him up at the bar he can just go on and tell them he’s taken.

His smile when Iris nods her wholehearted agreement…that might be another miracle in itself.


End file.
